Seminole Showdown Read online

  The time had come when Billy wanted to return to his family in Indian Territory, and Fargo hadn’t seen him since then, hadn’t even heard from him until the arrival of the crudely printed letter. Billy had learned to write since Fargo had known him; either that or he had gotten somebody to write the letter for him.

  The letter had been mailed from Fort Gibson, but Fargo knew the Seminole Nation was a good distance southwest of the fort, a fairly small area carved out between the Creek and Chickasaw reservations. That was where he would find Billy Buzzard, a region of fairly level terrain broken up by stretches of wooded hills and ridges. It was decent farmland, Billy had told Fargo, when the rains didn’t come too often and turn it into a bog. The numerous rivers and creeks in the area had a tendency toward flooding.

  The farm belonging to Billy’s family lay near one of those streams, Jumper Creek, not far north of the south fork of the Canadian River. Fargo knew he was getting close. He had replenished his supplies at Fort Gibson, and now they were running low.

  Of course, he wasn’t worried about going hungry if he didn’t reach his destination today. Small game abounded in this region, and plenty of edible plants grew here as well.

  But after the run-in with the kid, and then the ambush attempt, his gut told him that Billy had been right about the trouble plaguing his family. Fargo wanted to help his old friend if he could.

  He came to a stream he was pretty sure was Jumper Creek and followed it. Tendrils of smoke rose here and there in the distance, twisting through the late-afternoon sky. Fargo figured the smoke came from the chimneys of Seminole cabins.

  A narrow road that was little more than a trail crossed the creek on a rickety wooden bridge up ahead. Fargo reached the bridge just as a wagon approached it along the road from the north. He reined in to let the wagon cross first, but the driver hauled back on the lines and brought the vehicle to a stop.

  Fargo’s lake blue eyes narrowed in surprise as he saw that despite the rough work clothes and the shapeless hat crammed down on thick dark hair, the driver was a woman. The breasts that swelled proudly under the homespun fabric of her shirt were unmistakable proof of that.

  Fargo was about to nod and say howdy when the woman reached down to the floorboard at her feet and picked up a shotgun. She pulled back the hammers, pointed it at him, and said, ‘‘If you try to come near me, mister, I’ll blow you in half. I swear I will.’’

  She spoke in a bold, defiant voice, but it held an undertone of fear, too. Folks sure were jumpy around here, Fargo thought. They kept pointing guns at him. First the kid, and now this woman.

  Staying right where he was and keeping his hands in plain sight, Fargo said, ‘‘I’m not looking for any trouble, ma’am. So I’d sure be obliged if you’d lower those hammers and point that scattergun somewhere else.’’

  She snorted in disbelief. ‘‘Of course you’re not looking for trouble,’’ she snapped. ‘‘A white man in the middle of the Seminole Nation. What are you looking for, then?’’

  ‘‘Not what,’’ Fargo said. ‘‘Who. Billy Buzzard, to be precise.’’

  That surprised her. ‘‘Billy—’’ she started to exclaim. ‘‘You mean At-loo-sha?’’

  Fargo shook his head. ‘‘Sorry. I don’t know his Seminole name, only what he was called when he was working as a scout for the cavalry.’’

  She didn’t take the shotgun’s hammers off cock, but she did lower the barrels slightly. ‘‘You knew At-loo-sha when he lived with the white men?’’

  ‘‘That’s right.’’

  ‘‘Is your name Fargo?’’

  He smiled. ‘‘Right again. I’d be obliged if maybe folks would start asking me what my name is before they go to pointing guns at me.’’

  She ignored that and said, ‘‘Thank the Lord. At-loo-sha—Billy as you call him—said that you would come to help us.’’ She finally lowered the hammers and replaced the shotgun on the floorboard. ‘‘Have you been to his house yet?’’

  ‘‘Nope. I just got to these parts earlier this afternoon.’’

  ‘‘I’m on my way there now. Come with me.’’

  ‘‘I’d be glad to.’’

  She picked up the reins and slapped them against the backs of the mules pulling the wagon. The wheels clattered across the bridge. Fargo followed her on the Ovaro, and once they were south of the creek, he brought the stallion up alongside the wagon.

  ‘‘Just to complete the introduction, I’m Skye Fargo,’’ he told her as they followed the narrow path.

  ‘‘Echo McNally.’’

  Fargo had to smile. ‘‘That’s a mighty pretty name. It suits you.’’

  She returned the smile, a little reluctantly, Fargo thought. ‘‘Thank you.’’ She didn’t look at him but kept her attention focused on the mule team instead.

  That gave him a chance to study her profile, which was clean and strong and quite attractive. The smooth, reddish brown skin was a bit lighter than that of most Indians, showing that she was of mixed blood. Not surprising, since the Seminoles had freely intermarried with white outlaws and runaway slaves who had fled to the swamps in Florida. Even earlier, French and Spanish explorers had contributed their bloodlines to the Seminoles, as well as pirates of all races. It was a rich heritage, and Echo McNally looked like she might have a little of all those backgrounds in her.

  Her name didn’t surprise Fargo, either. Many members of the Five Civilized Tribes had taken ‘‘white’’ names. Some had never even been given traditional tribal names, especially the ones born since the removal to Indian Territory.

  Echo was in her early twenties, Fargo judged. He asked, ‘‘Are you related to Billy? Or just his friend?’’

  ‘‘His family and my family have been friends for many years,’’ she answered. ‘‘Since before our people were brought here.’’

  Fargo nodded, wondering if maybe Billy and Echo were more than friends. He would inquire of Billy about that later on, though. He didn’t want to embarrass the young woman.

  ‘‘Mind if I ask you something else?’’

  ‘‘I suppose not.’’

  ‘‘Why is everybody so jumpy around here? Billy wrote to me and told me he needed my help with some trouble, but he didn’t explain what it was.’’

  ‘‘I know.’’ Echo glanced over at Fargo. ‘‘I wrote the letter for him.’’

  ‘‘Then I’m betting you can tell me what’s going on.’’

  ‘‘Billy might prefer to do that himself,’’ she hedged.

  ‘‘Maybe. But the sooner I know what’s wrong, the sooner I can start figuring out what to do about it.’’

  ‘‘You seem very confident that you can help us.’’

  Fargo shrugged. ‘‘I’m very confident that I can do my best to help you. That’s exactly what I intend to do.’’

  She thought about it for a couple of seconds longer before she nodded and said, ‘‘All right. People have been disappearing from around here, and no one knows what’s happening to them. Women, specifically. Young women.’’

  Fargo frowned. ‘‘And you’re out driving around the countryside by yourself? I see why you brought along a shotgun.’’

  ‘‘I know how to use it, too,’’ she said with a touch of defiance.

  ‘‘I’ll bet you do. I’m still not sure it’s a good idea for you to be out here.’’

  ‘‘Nobody’s going to stop me from going where I want to go and doing what I want to do.’’ Now her voice was hot with anger. ‘‘I can take care of myself, no matter what—’’

  She stopped short, and Fargo wondered if she’d been about to say, ‘‘no matter what Billy says.’’

  ‘‘Anyway,’’ Echo resumed after a moment, ‘‘more than a dozen girls have vanished over the past three months. I should say that they’ve been taken, because I’m certain they didn’t go on their own, wherever they went.’’

  ‘‘You can’t know that for sure,’’ Fargo pointed out. ‘‘Sometimes folks will run off without telling anybody, es
pecially young ones. They argue with their parents, or they want to get married, or—’’

  ‘‘Not these girls,’’ Echo interrupted. ‘‘They weren’t the sort to do that. Besides, some of them were already happily married.’’

  ‘‘It’s hard to know exactly what somebody will do. People will fool you sometimes.’’

  Echo shook her head stubbornly. Fargo didn’t press the issue. She had to know more about it than he did, he reasoned, since she lived here and was acquainted with the people involved.

  ‘‘Go on,’’ he urged. ‘‘How did the girls disappear? They couldn’t just vanish into thin air.’’

  ‘‘At first, before people realized what was going on, they would be walking from one place to another and simply fail to arrive at their destination. Sometimes it would be one girl alone; sometimes two walking together. Then they began to disappear from the fields where they were working, or from their cabins when they were alone. By then people began to be afraid. Women were more closely guarded by their fathers or husbands. For a time no one vanished, and we hoped that whatever it was, it was over.’’

  ‘‘But it wasn’t,’’ Fargo guessed.

  Echo shook her head with a grim expression on her face. ‘‘It has started again. In the past week two young women have disappeared, including Wa-nee-sha . . . At-loo-sha’s sister.’’

  ‘‘Billy’s sister?’’ Fargo said. ‘‘That’s happened since he wrote me that letter, then. Or since you wrote it, I should say.’’

  ‘‘Billy told me what to put down on the paper. They were his words. He said that no one could follow a trail as well as you, that if anyone could find the women who had disappeared, it was Skye Fargo. Now we have more reason than ever to hope that he was right about you, Mr. Fargo.’’

  That was a heavy responsibility to put on a fella, Fargo thought with a frown. Some of the missing women had been gone for weeks. Any trails they might have left would be so cold as to be almost impossible to follow.

  But the disappearances had to be connected. Nothing else made any sense. So if he could find the women who had vanished the most recently, he might have at least a slim chance of finding the others, or finding out what had happened to them, anyway.

  He didn’t want to say as much to Echo, but there was a chance some of the women were dead. Whatever was happening to them, it couldn’t be good.

  Wanting to fill in more of the background, he asked, ‘‘Has anybody noticed any strangers in the area lately? Somebody who might be abducting those girls?’’

  Echo nodded. ‘‘People have seen groups of riders at night. No one knows who they are or what they want. Two men tried to follow their trail.’’ She paused. ‘‘They never came back. But we think those strangers are white men, trying to conceal their identities by riding at night. That’s why I was so suspicious of you.’’

  And chances were, that explained why the kid had been following him earlier and then tried to capture him. The youngster must have thought that he had trapped one of the men responsible for all the trouble.

  That might have explained the ambush, too . . . an overeager Seminole who believed he was taking a shot at somebody who had been kidnapping Seminole women . . . except for a couple of things. The boy was an Indian, and those bullets had come perilously close to him.

  And the bushwhacker Fargo had tussled with had been white. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the hombre, and it was true that some of the Seminoles with their mixed blood could pass for white . . . but that rifleman had had very fair, freckled skin and flaming red hair. Fargo doubted if there was a drop of Indian blood in his veins.

  He and Echo had come about a mile from the bridge over Jumper Creek. She said, ‘‘The farm is just over that rise ahead of us. I’m sure Billy will be glad to see you.’’

  ‘‘I’ll be glad to see him,’’ Fargo said with a smile. ‘‘I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for him. We got mixed up in a hot little skirmish with a Pawnee war party one time, and he wound up with an arrow in him that was meant for me.’’

  ‘‘Really? He never told me about that. Is that why he limps?’’

  ‘‘Yeah. It stuck in his hip. The company surgeon had to cut it out, and the wound never healed up just right. The limp never slowed Billy down much, though.’’ Fargo grinned. ‘‘I remember one time in Omaha—’’

  He stopped short as he realized that the story he’d been about to tell involved Billy Buzzard and not one, not two, but three soiled doves and wasn’t even close to being fit for the ears of a lady.

  ‘‘Yes, Mr. Fargo?’’ Echo said coolly. ‘‘Go on.’’

  ‘‘Ah, maybe you’d better ask Billy about that.’’ They had reached the top of the rise, and Fargo gestured at the log house that was visible a couple of hundred yards away. ‘‘That’s the farm up there, I reckon.’’

  ‘‘So it is,’’ Echo said. She flicked the reins and called out to her mules, urging them to a faster pace. She and Fargo started down the gentle slope toward the farm.

  But they hadn’t gone very far when a volley of shots blasted out, shattering the late-afternoon stillness.

  2

  Fargo reined in sharply and leaned forward in the saddle, motioning for Echo to bring the wagon to a halt as he did so. The light had begun to fade because the sun was almost down to the horizon in the west, but the Trailsman’s keen eyes made out puffs of powder smoke from some trees on the other side of the big, log farmhouse.

  ‘‘Stay here,’’ Fargo told Echo. ‘‘I’ll ride down and see if I can give Billy and his folks a hand.’’

  ‘‘I should come, too,’’ she insisted. She gestured toward the scattergun at her feet. ‘‘I’m a good shot!’’

  ‘‘Those trees where the bushwhackers are holed up are too far away from the house for a greener to do any good,’’ Fargo said, suppressing a surge of impatience at having to argue with her. ‘‘Blast it, just stay here!’’

  With that, he heeled the Ovaro into a gallop that carried man and horse down the slope. The stallion’s hooves drummed against the ground.

  Fargo guided the Ovaro with his knees as he slid the Henry from its sheath. The back of a galloping horse was no place for accuracy, but he brought the rifle to his shoulder and cranked off a few rounds toward the trees anyway, hoping to distract the hidden gunmen from their attack on the cabin. A moment later, the slope dropped down far enough so that he could no longer see the trees because the cabin was in the way. But that meant the attackers couldn’t see him, either.

  Now, if only the folks forted up inside the cabin didn’t take him for one of the varmints and open fire on him themselves. . . .

  That didn’t happen, and a moment later he brought the Ovaro to a skidding halt near a pole corral behind the house, which was large enough to have a back door, unlike smaller cabins that usually had only one entrance. Fargo vaulted out of the saddle and headed for the door at a run, carrying the repeating rifle.

  Somebody must have seen him coming, because the door suddenly swung open. Fargo bounded to the porch and ducked through the door, which slammed shut behind him. Gloom surrounded him. No lamps or candles burned inside the house, and he found the shadows hard to penetrate as his eyes tried to adjust.

  Those who were already inside the place could see better, as was demonstrated when someone called out, ‘‘Skye, you old horse thief! I thought it was you!’’

  Despite the fact that several years had passed, Fargo recognized Billy Buzzard’s voice. He headed across the big main room toward the windows at the front. The defenders had pulled the shutters on those windows nearly closed, leaving only narrow slits through which to fire.

  Those slits could let bullets in as well as out, though, and Fargo heard the high-pitched whine of a slug ricocheting from something inside the room. As he found a window no one was defending, he dropped to a knee, poked the Henry’s barrel through the gap between the shutters, and said, ‘‘I should’ve known I’d find you up to your neck in trouble, Billy. It a
lways had a way of finding you.’’

  Billy laughed from where he crouched at a window on the far side of the door. ‘‘You’re a fine one to talk, Skye. I never saw a man who could attract more ruckuses than you.’’

  Fargo fired toward the trees, which he could still see despite the gathering dusk. The shadows made the muzzle flashes under the trees more easily visible and gave him plenty of targets. At least a dozen men were out there, firing at the house.

  That group of night riders Echo had mentioned? Fargo thought that was likely, but of course he couldn’t know for sure that was who was attacking the farm.

  He emptied the Henry at the trees, then turned and sat down with his back against the wall under the window as he reached into one of the pockets of his buckskins for a handful of fresh cartridges.

  As he thumbed the rounds through the rifle’s loading gate, he looked around the room. Three men were at the other windows. Billy Buzzard was the only one with a repeater; the other two men, one older and one younger than Billy, had old single-shot rifles.

  Two women were in the room as well, an older woman and a girl about fourteen. They were reloading for the men, who passed their empty rifles back and took freshly loaded weapons from the women.

  As the younger man turned so that Fargo could see his face, he recognized the kid who had jumped him earlier in the gulch. That he was here came as no surprise to Fargo. He’d been halfway expecting as much.

  Billy Buzzard could fill him in on everything that Echo McNally hadn’t already told him, Fargo thought. Of course, before that could happen there was a little matter of surviving this attack on the farm. . . .

  Fargo finished reloading the Henry and turned around to kneel at the window again. As he thrust the rifle’s barrel through the gap between the shutters, he saw that the muzzle flashes in the trees had become more sporadic. He fired a couple of times, then lowered the Henry and said, ‘‘I think they’re pulling out.’’